A Crunchie Proposition (part one)

A Crunchie Proposition (part one)
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008

I’ve never wanted to be like everyone else. I’ve never longed to do the conventional thing. In fact I have embraced the other, as though being other is more natural to me, than being the same…

Yet by embracing the other, and incorporating aspects of other into my identity, I necessarily move from embracing the strange, to embracing the familiar. Whether it is accepting and celebrating my Jewish heritage, my single mother status, my multiracial family, my lesbian identity, I wear these aspects of identity like a technicoloured coat that spreads over my shoulders, covers my back, welcomes me into the warm embrace of belonging, even as such label might be seen to set me apart from the norm.

And so there are the twin aspects of wondering who am I from the inside, and hovering somewhere outside my body, guessing at the judgments others might make about me from the outside.

Like many people, I had a rocky passage from hiding in a closet of denial with my thumb in my mouth while the many doors kept slamming shut, to coming out of said closet and feeling defiant, sticking out no matter what, like that proverbial sore thumb, angry and exposed. From such strident assertions of my rights to be who I am, I have gradually shifted to a more patient and calm awareness of myself in this world which is to some extent of my own making.

Amazingly, where I find myself today is a beautiful place, full of opportunity, sprinkled with plenty of struggles to keep me honest and aware of my good fortune. I am happy to be me today… but for a long time, a large part of being me has meant not conforming. Not at all. Simply doing my own thing.

I was in my late teens in the late 1980s. The young people around me were dead set against following conventions. We didn’t have a gentle flower power way about us, either. We were brash and rude and our opinions were not always reasoned or coherent. We stood perpetually against and never for. We were anti-war, not pro-peace; anti-establishment, not pro-social justice; anti-car, not pro-public transport; anti-military-industrial-complex, not pro-humanity; we were anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-children and anti-future.

I’ve heard people say that in the shadows of the Cold War the people of my generation lived in a denial of their fear so icy, that many were unable to express what it meant to live from day to day wondering when that mushroom cloud would appear on our horizon. I grew up charmed and sheltered and naive. I wasn’t aware of this fear that permeated the lives of many of my peers. But still, I joined them in standing against whatever it was they said should be opposed.

The man I married had decided that getting married and starting a family would be his non-conformist stance. Or perhaps it was his response to being set adrift in a world of uncertainty. It was an aspect of his existence that he felt he could control.

When I learned that I had choices and I chose to end the marriage I rejected the sentiment of happily-ever-after-dom that had insinuated itself into my psyche despite itself, thanks to social conditioning. Now I knew for sure that THAT was not for me. The course of my life had been altered irrevocably, and I was going to do my damndest to make sure that never happened again. Marriage was really not going to be part of my future.

After 13 years I fell in love again. It was fun, but short-lived. I thought – well at least I know what it is to be loved and to love someone in that way. At least I won’t die without the knowledge that I can physically love another woman. It was liberating. I accepted my lesbian identity once and for all at last. I was (and am) the real deal. No longer that frightened little fence sitter.

I’ve been challenged of late, with discussions about the nature of lover relationships. People I know and people I know of are living polyamorous lives, in which they have multiple love-relationships and extended blended kinds of families. Again, it’s not anything I’ve ever wanted.

I’ve been challenged of late, with my own longing to make myself one with another person; to commit myself to our relationship; to live our lives together… The intention to make this commitment is undeniable, but something in me balks at naming our relationship a marriage.

I feel very reluctant to join the throngs of people who are suddenly embracing their right to celebrate their same-sex relationships. I don’t just want to do it because everyone else is! But I suspect my reluctance has more to do with wanting to be different, than with defining my role within my relationship; my partnership, as anything other than spouse to my beloved.

When I heard
ACT Attorney-General Simon Corbell on Radio National recently, defending the Government’s decision to register same-sex relationships but not to allow us to celebrate them as marriages, I felt the stifling walls of grey bureaucracy closing in around me. How typical it is, that the one perk of being a lesbian mother in a relationship will now be denied me (and my partner), at the same time that the Government openly denies us the right and the pleasure to celebrate our partnership as equally as any heterosexual couple.

What Simon Corbell said was so mean-spirited that as I sat in my car driving to work that day, my whole thinking on the business of marriage was turned around. I burned with a white hot flame of outrage to think that while my duly-registered relationship will be open to scrutiny and monitoring, particularly if we have children together, my partner and I will remain forever outside the circle of married couples. He said we have no right to a ceremony because a ceremony creates the relationship – obviously to the detriment of wider Australian society – whereas signing a register reflects a relationship that is already in existence.

The logic is somehow flawed, hopelessly dated – how many offspring preside at their parents’ weddings these days? Is legitimacy magically and retrospectively conferred upon said children because of the solemn vows to which their parents commit after the fact? The blatant hypocrisy of his position really makes me mad.

Dear Simon even had the gall to claim that the Government’s position on denying same-sex couples the right to marriage while opening up the possibility of registering our relationships was a way of protecting the rights of the children that “these people” might have.( If you listen to the audiocast you’ll notice he seems pathologically unable to say “lesbian” or “gay” though I believe he managed to utter “homosexual” at least once during the interview.)

Again my beloved and I are right on the money as per usual. In addition to being officially designated second-class citizens and not even a strictly de facto couple; as well as the discrimination and endless need to pick winnable battles for recognition of ourselves as a couple and of our family, we will be together in poorer circumstances, rather than in the security of anonymity that we could have gotten away with had we met a decade ago under the admittedly ever-tightening reins of Howard’s regime.

Once upon a time I envied the lesbian families that crossed my path from time to time. For one thing, the women had each other, even though they weren’t recognised as families, and even though the mothers were not recognised as a couple who were sharing the responsibilities for raising their children. In fact, one spouse was entitled to be named a Sole Parent with all the financial benefits that entailed, whether or not her partner was working, studying or indeed collecting Sole Parent benefits herself.

As I say, this was the one perk of being a lesbian mother.

Once the same-sex register is made a reality of 21st century Australia’s Fair Go we lesbian mothers can wave goodbye to any benefits whatsoever. Our families, like all the others, will be on the same punitive Centrelink regime. Even to get the normal rate of what was once called Child Endowment, we will be queuing with outstretched hands. So it goes.

Anyway, turning to a more pleasant topic, just how did our crunchie proposition come about? Incredibly, she and I employed the same linguistic conventions that couples immemorial have used and continue to use. It made no difference that we are both women. We were online at the time, though of course we’d spent the summer together in person. One of us said cheekily, “Will you marry me?” to which the other, with equal audacity and mounting enthusiasm replied “Yes! Yes! YES!” And in evoking this concept, it became real for us, whether or not we choose to label it as marriage.

In been developing our plans for the day, we’ve evolved two distinct ways of referring to it. Our homemade title “Promise Making Ceremony and Celebration” has given way to the more generally understood “Commitment Ceremony”. We are deliberate in choosing not to call it our wedding, or our marriage ceremony, because of course, that would be a lie. We are not entirely happy about this.

She and I and we have been having a lot of fun developing our own liturgy and rituals for our day, and despite the underlying wound that will not heal, of the public denial of our relationship, we expect it to be a meaningful, wonderful occasion to mark the official beginning of our living together. Yes, Mr Corbell, our relationship began last year, on the Melbourne Cup weekend, but our marriage, for lack of any better way to term it, will begin on January 17 2009 (Tevet 21, 5769).